full of fuel [BEST INSIGHTS PRIZE!]

May 2010

The project of full of fuel considers the climate change and the peak oil, and proposes to reunite inhabitants with the primary nature they’re issued.
The wish is to create some specific mutual-aid links between people and between them and nature.

full of fuel consists in reclaiming the future abandonned sites after the peak oil. It coul be possible to deal with petrochimical factories -2 in Lyon-, but the project has the wish to propose a human scale action and more precisly to make an action at the neighbourhood scale, in order to each one of us could have the feeling to be concerned.

Thus, we need to reconsider the term of landscape.
Nowadays, we can’t restrain landscape as the nature. And to extend it, Lucien KROLL set straight us about a new consideration of landscape.

«The landscape : we want to call landscape the shape produced by countless compatible peoples actions which continually weaving connections between things, and not the big arbitrary decisions which produce something monumental, propaganda.»

Therefore, a lot of interactions has to be integrated to think about the landscape of the city’s territory. Social, ecosystemic, financial but not only. The question of the time, the growing, the sensitization, the way of dwell in the contemporary city are the base of this project.

It’s intersting to point some existing dispositives and to compare them to the localization of filling stations in Lyon, surely the first territories in distress with a peak oil.
The choice is to take possession of filling stations. Actually, we count 39 allocated around the historical center.

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Re-functionalizing fueling stations, it’s to intervene in all the city areas. However, the intervening scale being small, it’s not altering the neighbourhood. Each one keeps its own character but a real breathing space of proximity is growing ; a convenience green space.

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3 steps to do it

DETOXIFICATION

In a first time we need to clean the ground which has support a lot of pollution from the cars during many years. Concerning this action, we propose to take out the cisterns and the asphalt to plant the different kinds of vegetation. In this aim we need to put at first specials trees (like Aloe barbadensis) which have the capacity to absorb the pollution.

RE-USE & REINFORCE

In a second time we re-use all the different things that we can find on the site : the cistern for the water - the penthouse roof to make a box for the share garden - the panel for the descriptive - the little building to order the garden tools, the seedbed or to shelter different actions like education, vegetable sale - a part of the road to have new bicycle path … and of course the ground to re-introduce nature in the city.

CREATE ACTIONS FOR A TERRITORY MUTATION

At the end we create like a big nature network constituted by different kinds of little parks and gardens for each neighbourhood and link by the “green finger” bicycle paths.

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The different filling stations transformed are mainly invaded by a controled nature in the first time. It’s allowing the evolution of a new ecosystem with its rules, receiving time after time a «third landsacape».

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Indeed the first phase consists to rid of pollution the different grounds by planting a specific vegetation, some tree species. In a second time, a regional vegetation will grow in this urban environment, supporting the first plantation.
Then, nature reclaims its rights and its own logic ; different species, not anticipated, will grow in their turns.

Filling stations’ shops not possessing an outdoor land are used to create sell points for the market gardeners from around Lyon.
Import is made by the way of the proximity and the redistribution can made on the site or by bicycle taking the new bicycle path network created.
Some filling stations will used to create new share gardens.
This practice, already widespread in Lyon, is not yet installed anywhere in the city. Aware about the importance for everyone to have a direct and simple connection with the land, the earth, the project introduces this gardening practice in each area without it, and especially near schools - kindergartens, primary and secondary schools. In some case, university has its own share garden.

Converted filling stations in share gardens, w ill based on a out-of-soil-culture, (not really hydroponics because the culture is still with soil but it’s deconnected with the real land).

Reusing the steel roof of the actual penthouse on the station will let to create one big or many smallest boxes to cultivate.
Those gardens will give an «on the spot» harvest of food. It will developp time after time, more and more in order to reduce the costly and polluting import with our actual way of operating.
This culture of the proximity will have too an educational part as it’s reconciling human with its environment and what their are able to produce.

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Working as a network, those new landscapes are linked by «green fingers».
The cars traffic being reduced, these will placed on some existing roads, operating a mutation as green bicycle paths.
The city of Lyon having a strong rental bikes network -Velo’v-, each old filling stations have at proximity a Velo’v station. For exceptions without an existing Velo’v station, a new bicycle rental station will created.

«Green fingers» linking differents stations give to city a bicycle paths network, creating a new type of urban park, a urban fragmented park. They represent more than 10% of the existing paths (existing : 300km, green fingers : 35km).

At urban-wide the project is acting as acupuncture regenerating some ungraceful places, became uneeded, in order to inject a new landscape made by signs and traces of what there was in place, nature and inhabitants.
Then those spaces reactivated, project is establishing links between them so as to form a whole making city.

Rather than to create only one big park, here the development of several entities are forming and define a whole. Each one can keep its own character without to smooth the identity of each neighbourhood. Futhermore, their small sizes is allowing an easy land grabbing by inhabitants.But it's not fixed, it could be change if people want, suggest. Full of fuel includes the possibility to change and to become refined in contact with inhabitants.
Each area will have its own specific garden but it will also be linked to the city with the «green fingers».
Some identities linked by a pleasant network.